Andy Aitchison

Andy Aitchison, an old mate and editor at Network Photographers, has for the last five years been documenting the Orthodox Jewish Community in Stamford Hill in London. Not only is this work excellent but shows a unique commitment to a section of London’s community that is normally firmly closed. It’s part of Photomonth and is on at Madam Lillie in Stoke Newington – open for a month, every Friday – Sunday, noon – 6pm until Sunday 6th of December 2009.

I spent my first couple of years in a cold, damp house in Stamford Hill in the late 1960’s and the areas always been a draw for me: but unlike Andy, I never got around to exploring so thoroughly.

Yer actual Olympics. Innit?

I just picked up a story today from the Newham Recorder about how, and I quote,

“Pie and mash, jellied eels and a dose of Cockney charm will be used to sell a slice of the East End during the 2012 Olympics”.

Apparently the Mayor wants to showcase ‘local’ foods at the events but it seems that independent food producers will be excluded by the Olympic Committee in favour of exclusive deals with multi-national chains. Of course there’s nothing like watching supremely talented athletes in a competition sponsored by a burger company specialising in fatty, over salted, reconstituted animal ‘product’. The irony of the Olympics was never lost on Iain Sinclair however, and in this piece he articulates what a great number of Londoners feel – that the whole thing is a unsavoury liaison between developers and government. It will undoubtedly make both parties a great deal of money but like the enormous blue fence that surrounds the building work will effectively exclude the locals.

Interestingly, the traditional non-globalised foodstuffs of the London poor – eels, fish and chips and cheap cuts of meat, never caused an epidemic of obesity, developmental problems or litter. Still, best not to stand in the way of progress…

Here’s an image to warm the cockles on a cold November night – a shot of a pie and mash shop in Hoxton produced for an Annual Report a couple of years ago.

Bon appetit.

UK - London - a woman pours liquor into a carton in a Pie and Mash shop in Hoxton
UK - London - a woman pours liquor into a carton in a Pie and Mash shop in Hoxton

The Unseen Bert Hardy

Tomorrow night (the 10th of November) the Photographers Gallery in London will host a talk by Graham Harrison who has recently unearthed work from the Hulton Archive by Bert Hardy. If you are in town, I urge you to go.

Hardy was a giant of the British documentary press tradition and is best remembered for his work for Picture Post Magazine. Born into poverty in Blackfriars he taught himself photography and was renowned for his sensitive, human images of war and everyday life.

Bert was an inspiration for me and I had the privilege to photograph him shortly before he died in 1995 upstairs in the flat above the darkroom that he’d set up near Waterloo. I had hoped to show that image here but after moving offices recently, I’ve mislaid the transparency. I will post it soon I hope. I’d also like to write more about the Bert Hardy Darkrooms and Charlie who tirelessly printed my work for more than a decade – and I will soon.

It seems that Graham, an extraordinarily talented photographer and now the creator of the Photo Histories website has found a huge number of Hardy’s unpublished images for Picture Post. Some of the very best will be shown for the first time.

Audrey Niffenegger

A recent portrait set on Audrey Niffenegger, author of the Time Traveller’s Wife and lately Her Fearful Symmetry for an American client. Shot in Highgate Cemetery on a chilly autumn day.

UK - London - Audrey Niffenegger, American author
UK - London - Novelist Audrey Niffenegger whose last book, The Time Traveler's Wife has just been made into a film. Her new novel is called Her Fearful Symmetry. It's the story of twins who move to London to an apartment left them by their dead aunt. A good deal of the novel takes place at Highgate Cemetery where in real life Niffenegger volunteers as a guide

Michael Clark – a blast from the past…

So, last Friday I went to see Michael Clark’s new work, ‘Come, been and gone‘ at the Barbican – his tribute the the 1970’s music of Lou Reed and David Bowie. Shockingly good if only for seeing Kate Coyne stuck all over with syringes… (you had to be there). Anyway, I remembered that I’d recently scanned an old set of trannys of Clarke in rehearsal for ‘Mmm’ years ago. All shot on 320 Tungsten film pushed one or two stops… you had to hold your breath and hope the shadows wouldn’t block completely. With the advent of digital, that seems such a long time ago…

Anyway, here’s some images from that set…

UK - London - Ballet dancer Michael Clark in rehersals for his ballet "Mmm"
UK - London - Ballet dancer Michael Clark in rehersals for his ballet "Mmm"

Ballet dancer Michael Clark in rehersals for his ballet "Mmm"
UK - London - Ballet dancer Michael Clark in rehersals for his ballet "Mmm"
UK - London - Ballet dancer Michael Clark in rehersals for his ballet "Mmm"
UK - London - Ballet dancer Michael Clark in rehersals for his ballet "Mmm"

Giving Pollution the finger…

A couple of days ago, I read an article in Open Magazine about Indian performance artist, Inder Salim cutting off his finger.

“One hot April morning, I chopped off the little finger of my left hand and threw it into the dead river called Yamuna. They call me crazy. But I call it art.”

Well quite.

It seemed quite a brave thing to do to make a point and I’m not going to give him a hard time for being so literal about highlighting the state of Delhi’s famous river.

The Yamuna is one of India’s greatest rivers. Holy to Hindus, The Imperial Gazetteer of India in 1909 mentions the waters of Yamuna distinguishable as “clear blue” as compared to silt-ridden yellow of the Ganges. Unfortunately, the Yamuna that runs through present day Delhi is an open sewer and clinically dead.

I was so intrigued by Delhi’s water situation a couple of years ago and made some work around it that became a film for More4 news. You can see the piece here.

The point was that Delhi’s water wasn’t in this hellish state as the result of appalling poverty – all those pesky poor people washing and cremating themselves in it – rather a complete lack of infrustructure around water management and wholescale pollution by industry. That hasn’t stopped the Delhi authorities evicting thousands of poor Delhi-wallahs that lived on its banks over the last few years.

There are perfectly sensible answers to the state of the Yamuna – Indian answers too. Brilliantly articulated by Sunita Narain, Director for the Centre for Science and Environment, she says: ‘A city will be more efficient if it collects water locally, supplies it locally and disposes waste locally’. There’s an excellent piece by her here.

Anyway, as Delhi looks forward to the 2010 Commonwealth Games, I’m hoping that someone will finally listen to Narain and the other Indian environmentalists, too numerous to mention, whose message about water, the city and sustainability has yet to seep into the murky waters of government. But I’m sure they will be able to  smell it…

India - Delhi - A scavenger looks for discarded waste to sell on a home made raft of rags in the Yamuna River by the Kudsia Ghat in Delhi. The river is so polluted it can no longer support life yet a community live and work on it's banks. This boy uses a powerful magnet to dredge for coins and other metals which he can sell.
India - Delhi - A scavenger looks for discarded waste to sell on a home made raft of rags in the Yamuna River by the Kudsia Ghat in Delhi. The river is so polluted it can no longer support life yet a community live and work on it's banks. This boy uses a powerful magnet to dredge for coins and other metals which he can sell.
India - Delhi - A man made homeless by slum clearance in a shack on the middle bank of the Yamuna River in Delhi by the Kudsia Ghat. An entire settlement was destroyed by the Municipal authorities in December 2006 to clear the bank of people that made a living from scavaging on the river which is so polluted it can no longer support life
India - Delhi - A man made homeless by slum clearance in a shack on the middle bank of the Yamuna River in Delhi by the Kudsia Ghat. An entire settlement was destroyed by the Municipal authorities in December 2006 to clear the bank of people that made a living from scavaging on the river which is so polluted it can no longer support life
India - Delhi - A religious icon half submerged on the banks of the Yamuna River in Delhi by the Kudsia Ghat.
India - Delhi - A religious icon half submerged on the banks of the Yamuna River in Delhi by the Kudsia Ghat.
India - Delhi - Rubbish on the banks of the Yamuna River by the Kudsia Ghat in Delhi
India - Delhi - Rubbish on the banks of the Yamuna River by the Kudsia Ghat in Delhi
India - Delhi - A sewer pipe flowing straight into the Yamuna by the Kudsia Ghat, New Delhi, India
India - Delhi - A sewer pipe flowing straight into the Yamuna by the Kudsia Ghat, New Delhi, India
India - Delhi - An old man sits by a temple at the Nigambodh Ghat on the banks of the River Yamuna in New Delhi India
India - Delhi - An old man sits by a temple at the Nigambodh Ghat on the banks of the River Yamuna in New Delhi India
India - Delhi - A man cultivates land by the Yamuna River in Delhi by the Kudsia Ghat.
India - Delhi - A man cultivates land by the Yamuna River in Delhi by the Kudsia Ghat.
India - Delhi - Methane bubbles through the water of the filthy Yamuna River, New Delhi. The river is so polluted that it can no longer support life, however a community still live and work on it's banks.
India - Delhi - Methane bubbles through the water of the filthy Yamuna River, New Delhi. The river is so polluted that it can no longer support life, however a community still live and work on it's banks.
India - Delhi - A group of men come to perform a ritual of casting ashes into the Yamuna River, after a cremation of a family member. Nigambodh Ghat, New Delhi, India
India - Delhi - A group of men come to perform a ritual of casting ashes into the Yamuna River, after a cremation of a family member. Nigambodh Ghat, New Delhi, India
India - Delhi - A man ritually bathes in the Yamuna River at dawn
India - Delhi - A man ritually bathes in the Yamuna River at dawn

Virgins, virgins everywhere…

I happened quite by chance the other day to look at the winners of the Eugene Smith Award and noticed that one of the runners up had made a set on a story that I wrote and photographed for the Independent Magazine more than a dozen years ago (the article’s here). It firstly made me feel a little ancient but also made me think about the crisis in photography that we now find ourselves in. I’d recently read a comment by Christopher Anderson on the Conscientious blog that made complete sense to me. Anderson, who has been sharply criticised for his thoughts, has bemoaned the state of the industry and – shock, horror – has decided that he no longer wants to be known as a ‘photojournalist’ (whatever that is). What he said was this:

“…The death of journalism is bad for society, but we’ll be better off with less photojournalism. I won’t miss the self-important, self-congratulatory, hypocritical part of photojournalism at all. The industry has been a fraud for some time. We created an industry where photography is like big-game hunting. We created an industry of contests that reinforce a hyper-dramatic view of the world. Hyperbole is what makes the double spread (sells) and is also the picture that wins the contest.”

I am certainly not criticising anyone who enters competitions, nor am I making any statement about the specific Virgins story, but whether we like it or not it’s clear that we are, and for some time have been in a mess. I remember Neil Burgess several years ago bravely saying that it was now impossible to fairly judge the World Press Photo as there were just so many entries and it was clear that people were shooting certain types of stories that were dramatic and would stand a greater chance of winning. Indeed a few years ago, if you shot Chinese child gymnasts being stretched in training you were almost certainly going to win something…

When I started, I knew nothing about competitions, awards and such like. I just wanted to work, make pictures and have magazines run my stories. The world has changed significantly form what seems those simpler times (although cvertainly not some mystical Golden Age) and winning things is now part of your ‘brand’, something to put on your website and blog and advertise yourself with. Shocking really when you think of much of the subject matter. But this is increasingly an industry running scared and my little rant is going to make no difference – especially to photographers that would sell their grandmother (or a few starving people in the Developing World) to work (for hire, for free, for a bad contract, just to see their work in print) and screw everyone else.

Anyway, have a look at the Eugene Smith stuff, there’s some interesting pictures. I’m going for a lie-down as my blood pressure’s up.

Here are some images from my Avowed Virgins story…

Albania - Lepurush Village - Selman Brahim has been living as a man for 40 years after the family's eldest son died. In the Albanian tradition of the Avowed Virgin ('Virgjineshe' or 'Sworn Virgins'), authorised by the Kanun of Lek (an ancient system of laws) she/he now leads the family as a man.
Albania - Lepurush Village - Selman Brahim has been living as a man for 40 years after the family's eldest son died. In the Albanian tradition of the Avowed Virgin ('Virgjineshe' or 'Sworn Virgins'), authorised by the Kanun of Lek (an ancient system of laws) she/he now leads the family as a man.
Albania - Thethi - The 'Accursed Mountains of Northern Albania. The harsh and unforgiving landscape of hills is renown for outlaws and bandits and is mentioned by the explorer Edith Durham in her seminal work "High Albania" (1909). The land is still governed by the ancient Kanun of Lek and blood feuds are still common.
Albania - Thethi - The 'Accursed Mountains of Northern Albania. The harsh and unforgiving landscape of hills is renown for outlaws and bandits and is mentioned by the explorer Edith Durham in her seminal work "High Albania" (1909). The land is still governed by the ancient Kanun of Lek and blood feuds are still common.
Albania - Thethi - Pashke Sokol Ndocaj sits with the men and a female neighbour in their village. Since the death of her father and brothers, Pashke has lived as a man in the ancient traditions of Avowed Virgins of Albania, where women 'become' men to head the family and renounce their former sex
Albania - Thethi - Pashke Sokol Ndocaj sits with the men and a female neighbour in their village. Since the death of her father and brothers, Pashke has lived as a man in the ancient traditions of Avowed Virgins of Albania, where women 'become' men to head the family and renounce their former sex
Albania - Thethi - Pashke Sokol Ndocaj with a  neighbours child. Since the death of her father and brothers, Pashke has lived as a man in the ancient traditions of Avowed Virgins of Albania, where women 'become' men to head the family and renounce their former sex
Albania - Thethi - Pashke Sokol Ndocaj with a neighbours child. Since the death of her father and brothers, Pashke has lived as a man in the ancient traditions of Avowed Virgins of Albania, where women 'become' men to head the family and renounce their former sexAlbania - Lepurush Village - Selman Brahim has been living as a man for 40 years after the family's eldest son died. In the Albanian tradition of the Avowed Virgin ('Virgjineshe' or 'Sworn Virgins'), authorised by the Kanun of Lek (an ancient system of laws) she/he now leads the family as a man. She/he is seen here with her sister's grandchild and a picture of him/her as a younger person
Albania - Lepurush Village - Selman Brahim has been living as a man for 40 years after the family's eldest son died. In the Albanian tradition of the Avowed Virgin ('Virgjineshe' or 'Sworn Virgins'), authorised by the Kanun of Lek (an ancient system of laws) she/he now leads the family as a man. She/he is seen here with her sister's grandchild and a picture of him/her as a younger person
Albania - Lepurush Village - Selman Brahim has been living as a man for 40 years after the family's eldest son died. In the Albanian tradition of the Avowed Virgin ('Virgjineshe' or 'Sworn Virgins'), authorised by the Kanun of Lek (an ancient system of laws) she/he now leads the family as a man. She/he is seen here with her sister's grandchild and a picture of him/her as a younger person

Willy Ronis

The France 24 website has a lovely slideshow tribute to the last, truly great, mid- century French photographer, Willy Ronis.

I have always loved his work for it’s romantic but humanist perspective. The beautiful, evocative portrait of his wife, the Leftist artist Marie-Anne Lansiaux, at the sink – Nu Provençal (1949) is deservedly one of the most famous images in photography.

We used to distribute Rapho’s images at Network and I could never quite get over the thrill of being able to look into that extraordinary archive.

The last word to Ronis though who said that ‘to transform chaos into harmony is the constant quest of the seekers of images’.